Wendy Kaufman

Kaufman was born in North Woodmere, New York, to a homemaking mother and a father who owned a steel manufacturing company. She grew up in North Woodmere and attended Lawrence High School,[1] graduating from Syracuse University in 1980 with degrees in film and sociology.

In 2002 Kaufman began taking classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and was accepted to the school's graduate program contingent upon her taking a probability and statistics course. Based upon her immense fear of mathematics in general, she refused to take the course but still sporadically takes undergraduate courses.

She then worked for ten years in the shipping and billing department of her father's company until 1989. In 1991, she began working for Snapple Beverage Corporation for her best friend's father, Arnold Greenberg, one of the three founders of Snapple.

When Kaufman was a young child, she wrote her one and only fan letter to Greg Brady (Barry Williams), which went unanswered. So, at Snapple, when she realized how many people were trying to connect with the company, she took it upon herself to answer all the letters, since she remembered how terrible she felt when Williams never replied.

When it was discovered that Kaufman had been answering Snapple fan-mail in her free time (because nobody in the office wanted to do it themselves), their brand new advertising agency, Kirshenbaum & Bond, developed a campaign around her energetic personality. She appeared, until 1994, in television, radio, and print advertising wherein she answered letters written to Snapple with witty responses. Kaufman's 1990s Snapple ad trademark was to appear on camera with her head barely peeking out over the Snapple reception counter, giving the viewer the impression that she was incredibly short in stature (She is 5 feet 2 inches (157 cm) tall). She would begin each commercial by saying in a thick New York accent that she received a letter from a particular Snapple fan, who would then be included in the commercial.

Kaufman's humorous Snapple ads were well received, especially among members of Generation X, and she was partially responsible for a jump in Snapple's sales from 23 million dollars a year to 750 million a year in 1995. She was terminated in 1994, upon Snapple's sale to Quaker Oats. However, when Quaker sold Snapple to Triarc brands in 1997, they reinstated Wendy as the Snapple goodwill ambassador.

• Wendy Kaufman at IMDb